Peru’s modern history of migration and settlement

Four roads with an enormous impact on rural Peru were built starting in the 1970s, incentivizing migration in the second half of the 20th century to the Amazonian lowlands from the Andean foothills.The largest single migratory destination in the Peruvian Amazon is landlocked Iquitos; immigrants arrived there in search of jobs in the oil industry. Currently counting more than 500,000 inhabitants, Iquitos is now the largest city in the Western Amazon.The cultivation of coca has had major impacts on the development of Peru’s Amazonian regions. Violent clashes between armed groups searching to dominate the activity have pushed as many as 450,000 people out of their homes.

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Policies designed to occupy and populate the Peruvian Amazon began about seventy years ago with the construction of a trunk highway connecting Pucallpa on the Ucayali River with Lima. Named after a Peruvian historian, the construction of the Carretera Federico Basadre is a landmark event in the nation’s history, because it provided the first reliable means of communication between the capital and the Amazonian provinces that make up more than fifty per cent of Peru’s territory. The next major initiative began when the government added a northern spur through the montane forests of the Huallaga Valley, which was intended to integrate its northern Amazonian provinces while opening a lush tropical valley to agricultural development.

Construction of these two highways was financed with state resources in the 1970s, when a left-wing military government had limited access to international finance. After a return to civilian government in the 1980s, multilateral institutions financed several project-based initiatives, but these were soon sidelined when the country entered a period of civil unrest that impeded economic growth and foreign investment. The economy improved in the 1990s following the end of the civil war, and the government, then led by Alberto Fujimori, initiated a series of system-wide investments in transportation infrastructure using public money leveraged with loans from the IDB.

The system-wide approach was complemented in 2000 with the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), which improved the strategic planning of highway investments in general, while promoting public-private partnerships (PPP) to accelerate the completion of key construction projects. Under the neoliberal scheme, construction companies financed the construction cost in exchange for operating concessions that would generate revenue to amortize the debt. At the time, PPPs were seen as an innovative mechanism for accelerating investment, while ensuring repayment of a sovereign debt. Unfortunately, their utility has become clouded by the Lava Jato bribery scandals (see below).

Proyectos Especiales (PE) were launched by the government of President Fernando Belaunde in 1985 to promote the settlement of landscapes adjacent to the proposed Carretera Marginal de la Selva; simultaneously, the colonization zones were connected to the Pacific Coast by highways that are now referred to as ‘Interoceanic Corridors’. From North to South: PEJSIB: Jaén – San Ignacio – Bagua (Amazonas); PEAM: Alto Mayo (San Martin); PEHCBM: Huallaga Central – Bajo Mayo (San Martín); PEAH: Alto Huallaga (San Martin and Huánuco); PEPP – Pichis Palcazú (Huánuco, Junín, Pasco y Ucayali); PEMD: Madre de Dios (Madre de Dios). Data source: Belaunde (1985).
Migratory pathways

Migration into the Amazon Lowlands of Peru in the last half of the twentieth century occurred via four major and four minor highway corridors. All have been settled by migrants originating in the Andean highlands, typically referred to as Colonos or Campesinos. The four major migratory routes are now all IIRSA-sponsored transportation corridors, while the four minor corridors tend to connect isolated villages in the foothills with highland population centers; typically, they track a river and often provide access via unpaved roads to a region known for coca production (6.2)

The modern history of migration and settlement is best characterized by the frontier landscapes in the Department of Ucayali, on the piedmont between the foothills and the departmental capital of Pucallpa. The department was home to about 175,000 inhabitants in 1970, but by 1990 had a population of 400,000, and in 2020 was home to more than 850,000 people, almost all of them immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. About 200,000 reside within Pucallpa, an important river port and logistical center, while the rest are distributed in dozens of communities along the main trunk highway or secondary roads.

The second most important migratory corridor is the Huallaga Valley, which can be subdivided into two sections: the upper valley, which is situated largely within the Department of Huánuco, in what was originally the cloud forest; and the lower valley, in the Department of San Martin. The upper valley was largely wilderness until the two major highways were built. Early colonists around Tingo María included coffee farmers of European descent, as well as highland Indigenous migrants who pursued the typical mixed production model of subsistence and cash crops. Coca became popular in the 1970s, and the valley was dominated by violent militant groups in the 1980s. The upper Huallaga Valley includes Tocache, the site of Peru’s first large-scale oil palm plantations, which were established in the late 1970s.

The lower valley was settled by Spanish (Criollo) settlers because of its mild tropical climate, fertile soils and abundant water resources. The floodplain is occupied by medium-scale farmers who managed to avoid the confiscation of their properties during the agrarian reform of the early 1980s, although many suffered from the guerilla conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s. The influx of highland peasants that accompanied the construction of the Carretera Ferdinando Belaunde led to widespread settlement and deforestation on the hills and ridges surrounding the floodplain (see Annex 6.2).

View of the forest from the canopy located in Tambopata, in the Madre de Dios region of Peru. Image by Rhett A. Butler.

The population of San Martin grew from about 250,000 in 1970 to more than a million by 2015. The Corredor Interoceánico – Norte intersects with the Carretera Marginal de la Selva at the departmental capital of Tarapoto and terminates at Yurimaguas. The landscape between Tarapoto and Yurimaguas is an active colonization zone with the highest deforestation rate in the country. The land rush has now moved to the eastern side of the last Andean ridge and continues to expand across the flat and rolling landscapes adjacent to the Huallaga River below the Pongo de Aguirre.

Oil palm is the lead cash crop, attracting both corporate and smallholder farmers.

Peru’s most active migratory destination is the Department of Madre de Dios, where a gold rush has attracted an estimated 15,000 miners. The total number may be greater, however, since many are temporary migrants who move to the area to seek their fortune or, more likely, obtain a tough job with no benefits. An additional 30,000 individuals, about 35 per cent of the total population, make a living by selling goods and services to the miners. Immigration to Madre de Dios has been greatly facilitated by the construction of the Corredor Interoceánico – Sur. The establishment of small farms along the highway is the second-largest cause of deforestation after mining.

Peru’s river network is also a migratory pathway, and there are hundreds of settlements along the Ucayali River and its backwater channels and tributaries. The Peruvian state has yet to finalize the land tenure formalization process, but most families have claimed forty-hectare plots since the colonization process began in the 1960s. Most cultivate annual crops for family consumption, but sell excess produce into the national food market; most also allocate land to pasture and perennial cash crops. Coca is cultivated in small patches along the margin of the forest frontier.

The largest single migratory destination in the Peruvian Amazon is Iquitos, whose history is completely different from that of the other migratory routes. Because Iquitos has no road link to the coast, migrants arrive by river or air. Immigrants have moved to Iquitos in search of jobs in the oil industry or one of the service sectors that dominate the local economy. The city grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s following the discovery of oil, which continues to dominate the local economy.

About half the families who have moved to Iquitos are from lowland Ribereño communities and are descendants of Indigenous people who were assimilated into mestizo culture during the rubber boom. Most of the rest have come from the Pacific Coast, particularly Lima. The oil industry requires skilled workers, who can only be provided by universities and trade schools located in large urban centers. Iquitos was still a medium-sized city with a population of 100,000 when oil was discovered in the 1970s along the border with Ecuador. It subsequently grew and, with more than 500,000 inhabitants, is now the largest city in the Western Amazon.

Most residents have settled their families in the city, but many have claimed plots of land in the colonization zone along the highway constructed between Iquitos and Nauta, a town located about 100 kilometers upriver near the junction of the Marañon and Ucayali rivers. Like Leticia in Colombia and Tabatinga in Brazil, Iquitos does not have a terrestrial connection to other population centers. This isolation limited deforestation to the Nauta–Iquitos road; until recently, when a corporation linked to the palm oil industry started clearing forest across the river from Iquitos to establish a cacao plantation.

Water box used for gold mining along the Tambopata River. Image by Rhett A. Butler.
Terror and coca

The other major social and political phenomenon that has impacted the development of Peru’s Amazonian provinces is the cultivation of coca, which is produced in six regions in the eastern foothills of the Andean Cordillera. The expansion of coca for the illicit drug trade began in the upper Huallaga Valley in the 1960s and spread to other parts of the country, particularly the VRAEM (Valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro Rivers) region on the border between Cuzco and Ayacucho and the La Convención and Lares districts in the Urubamba Valley near the international tourist site of Machu Picchu. These regions became epicenters of the armed conflict perpetrated by two competing insurgencies, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, and the Marxist Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA), in the 1980s and early 1990s.

These two groups occupied vast stretches of the rural countryside, and the violence they inflicted on the native population, combined with a harsh response from government forces, led to more than 65,000 deaths. As many as 450,000 individuals were forced to abandon their homes, including approximately 15,000 Asháninkas, who either fled their villages and retreated into the forest or were forced into concentration camps by Sendero Luminoso. The violence effectively halted investment by agro-industrial enterprises in the Peruvian Amazon, although the illicit activity stimulated the expansion of coca farms on the forest frontier. The organized violence ended in the mid-1990s, but the government has been unsuccessful in reducing the cultivation of illicit coca. The strategic vision of the Maoist leadership is no longer a factor, but many of the guerilla combatants remain active as criminal actors. Peru continues to produce about thirty per cent of the global supply of illicit cocaine.

The cultivation of coca has been significantly reduced only in the Selva Central and Huallaga Valley. Both of these regions have been the recipients of significant multilateral development assistance, particularly in alternative production strategies such as coffee, cocoa and palm oil, as well as in improved health and education facilities. Not incidentally, both regions are part of IIRSA-sponsored infrastructure projects that have greatly facilitated the connection of their producers with domestic and global markets. In contrast, the landscapes that have continued to embrace coca production remain relatively isolated from the national economy.

Banner image: Panoramic view from Wayqecha Biological Station, located near the transition between the cloud forest and puna of the Cusco region. Credit: Rhett A. Butler.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.